Out of the Mouths of Babes

Helvi Oosterman

We took the two grandsons out for a shopping trip and lunch on Sunday. This was meant to take our minds off the election misery and poor Milo’s hospital stay. Being rightly stressed by these two happenings on the same weekend and seeing seven abandoned shopping trolleys at one intersection on our return home in this most gentile and green suburb added to my irritability.

Of course these ‘stolen’ trolleys have already previously driven one family member into an almost heart attack causing rage, so the boys responded to my complaining about ‘I don’t understand this kind of low-life behaviour’ in their own instinctive ways; Thomas by burying his head in his newly purchased book wanting to give a miss to this typical family lament, and leaving the seven year old Max to air the third-generation views.

‘They are red-neck hillbillies, lazy Bogans, stupid bullies’…and to please us, after all he is our smart people person who knows the right thing to say in any situation: ‘They are Abbott Lovers!’

If Hung is our chief political writer, little Max can be our own social commentator, our Hugh MacKay !